Introduction to the Drone Journey

This post is the eleventh, and final, post in documenting the steps I went through on my journey to build an autonomous, voice-controlled, face recognizing drone. There are 10 other posts building up to this one which you can find at the end of this post.

Focus of this post

In this post I will share a video of the complete end-to-end demo and share details of the architecture which sits behind it. I will also share information on what I bought/used to bring this all together and relist all the different software, services and node packages in a single place.

Pulling It All Together

A lot of what we have been doing with this project is humanizing the way we communicate with machines/computers/things. That means talking and observing to drive intelligent interaction rather than using a mouse, keyboard or touch screen.

Our Autonomous Voice-Controlled, Face Recognizing, Drone is a smart drone which showcases, albeit crudely, how interaction with services filled with intelligence is going to evolve. It highlights the importance of cognitive services to the success of organizations in the future.

So with that said take a look at the entire end to end demo in the video below.

Your cloud journey – where should you start?

If you are reading this expecting me to tell you the answer then I am afraid I will disappoint you. Every single organization I have spoken to is different and I expect your organization is too. The cloud journey can take many different directions and what is the right place to start for one organization might not be right for another.

Beware of anyone that tells you their view of the “right answer” without first understanding your company, its priorities, its history and without first showing you the breadth of options available from which you can make your first steps.

This is a journey that needs to be navigated in partnership. It is your cloud journey not mine!

Early advice

Make sure you understand the breadth of what you can do today in the cloud.

Make sure you understand there are many different ways to work with the cloud. When you think about your cloud journey remember it is not a one size fits all.

Think about what your first, second and third workloads might be to decide who will be the best vendor for you.

Try to avoid falling into the trap of ending up with 10 cloud providers. Remember that learning multiple clouds is not in your best interest longer term and you will probably consolidate later.

Quantifying Cloud Adoption – Is It Really Happening?

In my post from yesterday, Cloud – Are You Already Falling Behind?, I shared my view that there is a shift of many companies to the cloud. In this post I want to share a little external validation that backs that up and helps quantify if cloud adoption is really happening or coming to an organization near you soon!

What the Analysts and Management Consultants are saying

We all know that not everything analysts and management consultants predict, and say, comes true. They are in a tough spot having to predict the future for sure reliant on information flowing from their many contacts and surveys. What we can do though is look at a variety of sources and from that draw some clear conclusions.

The question is no longer: ‘How do I move to the cloud?’ Instead, it’s ‘Now that I’m in the cloud, how do I make sure I’ve optimized my investment and risk exposure?

Cloud continues to drive disruption in the business world across the globe. In fact, a recent global KPMG survey 800 technology industry leaders ranked cloud as the technology that will have the greatest impact in driving business transformation for enterprises.

The IoT Continuum

Over the past months I have read a great deal about the Internet of Things (IoT) and how companies are moving forwards with it.

Looking across all the stories on the web it is clear that there is an IoT Continuum when you look at the different types of projects out there which many vendors are talking about.

This post shares some phases which I have summarized. I am interested to know if you think there are intermediate phases or even phases before or after these. I would also love to hear if you would alter the names and the focus!

Introducing the IoT Continuum

There are three things I see happening today with a fourth one maybe being the future. Certain projects will contain multiple phases of the continuum over time with each building on the previous one and each phase might be a milestone in a much bigger goal.

You might have ideas for different names for these and I would be very open to hearing your thoughts on that. The main question I want you to think about, after reading the phase descriptions below, is if you see different phases I have missed altogether? If so please share your thoughts and pointers to the stories that support them as I am eager to learn.

Cloudera has recently announced the One Platform Initiative, RecordService and Kudu. During a recent keynote speech, at the Cloudera Sessions in Munich, Mike Olson of Cloudera spent some time talking about the motivations for those moves.

This blog post shares what he spoke about, mixes that with some of my own reading and then adds my own take on some of the announcements. It also covers some of the other information relative to Cloudera which Mike shared during his speech. To find out more about the first half of his keynote see this post.

After reading this post you will understand what the One Platform Initiative is all about, what RecordService is and what it is trying to do, what Kudu is as well as what it is not and know a little bit more about Cloudera using the facts Mike shared as part of his keynote.